When Lewis wrote The Chronicles of Narnia, he had no theological agenda. There was no ulterior, evangelistic motive; he simply hoped to create likable stories. But the man’s worldview was as elemental to him as blood and bone. And his characters, plots, symbols, and themes are—unavoidably—products of it. Which explains why, in The Magician’s Nephew, we see the story of Creation (Aslan sings it into creation). We see temptation in the Garden and the Fall. And in the story that followed, death, judgment, Hell, and Heaven all enter the pages of Lewis’s fantasy.

“The figure of Aslan tells us more of how Lewis understood the nature of God than anything else he wrote.”

Lewis wasn’t smuggling Christian theology into the minds of young readers, it just seeped through; it poured out of the man and onto the page, likely causing the claims of Christianity to ring true when readers later met them.

Lewis, of course, wrote theological classics: Mere Christianity, The Four Loves, The Problem of Pain, Til We Have Faces, The Weight of Glory ….  Yet, his biographer says, it was the Narnia stories—the fantasies that our un-believing neighbors love—that most clearly reveal Lewis’s theology. The character of Aslan—the Lion who is known to nearly every kid on every block of the English-speaking world—is, George Sayer says, Lewis’s supreme achievement.

Sayer quotes the late monk Bede Griffiths, who said: “The figure of Aslan tells us more of how Lewis understood the nature of God than anything else he wrote. It has all the hidden power of majesty and awesomeness which Lewis associated with God, but also all the glory and the tenderness and even the humor which he believed belonged to him, so that children could run up to him and throw their arms around him and kiss him. There is nothing of ‘dark imagination’ or fears of devils and hell in this.” It is, Griffiths said, “mere Christianity.”

The Chronicles of Narnia, written from 1950 to 1956, remain popular, and fully stocked in every Borders bookstore. And yet these popular stories, because they’re the products of a mind steeped in Scripture, because they’re the fruit of an imagination sent soaring by the Christian gospel, cannot help but be Christian. Lewis and his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of the Lord of the Rings, have charmed millions with stories that are full of wonder, and profoundly biblical.

Art that Takes Shape in the Christian Mind is Different

Lewis, O’Connor, and Sayers personify the thoughts once espoused by Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. In 1974, in Art and Scholasticism, Maritain said, “Christian art is defined by the one in whom it exists and by the spirit from which it issues.” If you want to make Christian art, Maritain exhorted his audience, then simply be Christian and “…make a beautiful work.” He told aspiring novelists to “be fully an artist,” because, “the artist and the Christian are one …” and art that takes shapes in the Christian mind is different from the art that doesn’t.

This reality—that all writers express their worldview—was apparent to Walker Percy. The author of respected literary fiction—The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, Love in the Ruins … once told an interviewer that, “… as a writer, you have a certain view of man, a certain view of the way [the world] is, and even if you don’t recognize it or even if you disavow such a view you can’t escape [it].” Percy readily acknowledged that his own critically acclaimed novels, which routinely depicted man “as pilgrim, in transit, in journey…reflected a certain basic orientation toward … Catholic dogma.”

Like O’Connor, Percy saw his faith as a literary advantage. It was a way of seeing the world and a system for making sense of it. Christianity gave his stories texture and meaning. Even today, they strike a familiar chord—which is why his books are next to O’Connor’s at your nearest Books-A-Million. 

For Marilynne Robinson, There’s Only Respect for a Great Writer

Any list of the last century’s great writers includes O’Connor, Percy, Graham Greene, and Wendell Berry—all Christian, all gifted, and all of them an influential voice in the wider culture. Berry, now in his mid-seventies, remains formidable, still writing and speaking on environmental and agricultural issues.

Beyond him, the list of today’s best-known Christian writers includes John Grisham, Jan Karon, Bret Lott—and, course, Marilynne Robinson, the 2005 Pulitzer Prize winner (for Gilead). It’s no surprise that Robinson, when she talks about faith and vocation, echoes those who came before her. In a recent discussion with Katherine Lanpher, a Barnes & Noble interviewer, Robinson said that, “… There’s a theological [undercurrent] to everything I write.”

Lanpher pressed her, asking, “How does writing lend itself to a life of faith?”

Christians, should they abandon the field, leave it open to “those who expound falsehood.”

“I’ve never found them to be incompatible ….” Robinson replied. “Frankly, historically speaking, a great deal of English language literature is generated directly out of religious thought and religious erudition.” Then, with words that bring O’Connor and Percy to mind, she said, “For me, a religious mindset creates a habit of scrupulous inquiry relative to virtually everything ….” She explained to Lanpher that, “… everything has religious significance. It’s not as if I go from one area of interest to another,” she said, “they’re simultaneous for me.” 

The conversation later veers down this charming path, as the Pulitzer Prize winning Christian so casually explains to the secular interviewer on a nationally distributed podcast that John Calvin is “… cool in a lot of ways. If you read his sermons on the 10 Commandments,” Robinson explains, “they’re absolutely beautiful, profoundly humane interpretations of things that many people find forbidding.” She continues, talking about how Calvin situated sacred and human experience “in the mind and in perception,” and about how she feels indebted to the 16th century reformer for his understanding of, “… the givenness of everything.” 

From Robinson, throughout the whole of the conversation, there’s not a syllable of defensiveness; there’s no awkwardness, no need to shy away from anything she believes. And from Lanpher, there’s only respect for a great writer. 

More than 1,600 years ago, Augustine argued that Christians not only had a right to employ “the art of rhetoric,” but also the obligation. Though sometimes skeptical of literature, he recognized that Christians, should they abandon the field, left it open to “those who expounded falsehood.” Browse the shelves at the nearby Borders, and his words ring true.

“Christian fiction”—the books we find in the back of the bookstore—often edify and inspire us. And just as we need composers to create hymns, the church needs writers—novelists and theologians alike—to build up the body, to enhance our worship, to delight us with stories that exemplify the truths of the Christian faith. Still—it may be time to confess that we’ve left literature in the hands of those who have no hope to offer. It might be time to reconsider our neighbors and their need to make sense of the world; their need for books, poems, and short stories that probe life’s mystery, that offer hope without flinching from the Fall’s consequences, that don’t—by their sentimentality—mock our true state, or the price that was paid for the world’s redemption.

Richard Doster is the editor of byFaith. He is also the author of two novels, Safe at Home (March 2008) and Crossing the Lines (June 2009), both published by David C. Cook Publishers.